[vb2010] At what point did you finally "get it" & how did it come about?

I seem to do my coding / research in 'spurts'...like for a week at a time. I'll fix an issue with a personal program of mine / upgrade it / add new features etc. Do a whole lot of reading on the vbforums, research on google to learn a new method / function, start a thread to post a few questions on v.b.f. It seems like a year ago...if I would take a break for 2-months...I would totally forget everything & have to start over learning to program. Recently though, after a 2 month break... I seemingly pick-up where I left off from the last time...not 100% yet but it's getting easier to remember.

So I guess these questions are for those of you that consider yourselves "average / good" programmers.
Did you learn to program in Visual Basic on a full-time basis? If so, what amount of time passed before you felt like you had a firm grasp of the language & could knock out real-world tasks relatively easily?
Who was able to learn (a few days here & there) every couple of weeks? If so, what amount of time passed before you felt like you had a firm grasp of the language & could knock out real-world tasks relatively easily?
Who learned Visual Basic without having learned any other languages first? I'm asking this because it's what I'm doing!

How many of you were able to gain a firm grasp of coding without taking college courses?
How many of you are actually reading this post & not just killing time at work / appearing as if you're doing work-related research just in case your boss walks by?
How many of you aren't going to reply to this post because I'm a female & you think girls are totes yucky / and or unlikely to succeed in programming?
How many of you were able to gain a firm grasp of coding without first going through the entire "hello world" process / and without a firm grasp (at the start) of the core basic vocabulary?

Finally, how many of you would suggest finding a 'programming buddy' / 'mentor' / or paying for a 'tutor' as part of speeding up the learning process?

I learned in HS - back in the 1980's - and my mentor also became my boss as he was in the midst of creating a student information system.

VB is fine to learn first - syntax is easy...

College courses for programming did not exist in the 1980's.

I am my own boss now - so I'm reading this because I want to - I am active on the forum's to both mentor and to learn - it's a two way street regardless of how experienced you are.

I've had female employees - both good and bad. Same with male. I've often taken HS students and used them as code-monkeys, but also taught them along the way. One is working at Microsoft now - makes me very proud.

HELLO WORLD, in my opinion, is only helpful if you already know how to CODE and are starting a new language. I learned C++ and JavaScript as new languages over the past 2 or 3 years.

Find a place to intern - paid or free - and use that to get a real experience at a coding shop.

Thanks for your input, very thoughtful & full of information. If everyone's replies are like that then I'll be super happy because I'll be learning a lot!
I thought of interning somewhere... the problem is I have to stay at home 90% of the time because I take care of my little sister. I even do college @home.
Right now..well for the foreseeable future (until I can afford to hire an @home caretaker for her) I pretty much have no choice but to study from my bedroom.

I'm not sure that I can give much of an answer to many of these. Technically, I learned BASIC on a TRS-80 and Apple II back in the early 80s, but then I stepped away from any programming until after I got my Masters (in Biology, not computers). I've never taken any courses in programming, which is partly because they were barely offered. I could have taken some intro courses in HS, but I could also have taught those intro courses even with as little as I knew. The teachers were so new to programming themselves that anybody who brought prior knowledge to the class seemed to end up helping out. I didn't want to take the BASIC class, but would have had to take that before being able to take Pascal....so I took nothing. I don't even know what was offered in college.

I got back into coding while working as a biologist. I started out in Quattro Pro macro language (a competitor to Lotus 123 and precursor to Excel). This language was remarkably similar to ASM with a nearly infinite number of registers. As a teaching tool for some of the disciplines of coding, it was awesome. As a functional language....it sucked rocks. When I got Excel 95, I ported the programs over to VBA, which is where I first used Visual Basic. I had macros in Quattro Pro that took 8 hours to run, so I'd start them when I headed home, and look at the results the next day. If anything went wrong, I'd work on the program in the morning. If the fix took longer than that I'd generally quit for the day. I learned that I was unable to be effective for 8 hours in Quattro Pro. ASM requires plenty of comments, and Quattro Pro didn't really allow comments at all. I had to hold the contents of every register in my head at one time and after a few hours I'd start making so many mistakes that net progress was zero. Therefore, I learned to only work on the program for a couple hours, then move on to something else.

When I first re-wrote the macros in VBA and ran the first one, it finished in a second. In Quattro Pro, anything that finished in a second meant that you had a serious bug. I was amazed to find that the VBA macro had run flawlessly. That particular macro took 40 minutes to run in Quattro Pro and about a second in Excel. That's how bad Quattro Pro was.

I don't really remember learning VBA, though, because I had the working Quattro Pro macros, and I was just porting them over. Therefore, it was a matter of finding equivalent methods. By the time I had ported all the macros, I was fine with VBA, which meant I was also fine with VB5, then 6.

So, did I learn VB first? No.
Did I learn it in one block? I can't remember. I don't remember learning it at all.
Did I learn it episodically? Almost certainly, since I was also a fish biologist working in a swamp as my main job.
College courses? None.
I can call time spent here as learning, but nobody really cares because I'm pretty doggone effective, so nobody questions my methods.
Girls are totes? What does that even mean?
My sister is a pretty fair programmer, I think. I've never seen anything she's written, and she may have walked away from it ten years back, but she's awfully smart, so I wouldn't doubt that whatever she wrote was pretty good.
Going through Hello World? Actually, I think I learned by jumping off the dock, just as I learned to swim. I thought that the first functional macro I wrote in Quattro Pro was pushing the language to the limit. In retrospect, that first macro was the simplest one I ever wrote. It did do some fairly intensive stuff, and was a pretty useful program, since it accomplished in 20 minutes a task that hadn't been done for years because doing it by hand would take weeks or months. Still, it was pretty simple. The macro that took 8 hours did a statistical calculation which remains the most painful program to validate that I have ever encountered. The problem was that the calculation was so complex that two people with calculators were never able to work through a single test case without making several errors. Therefore, our results would never match what the program came up with, and whenever we went over our calculations we would find errors to correct. This meant that testing the accuracy of the program took a day for two people. Since these programs were where I started out, I think I pretty much didn't follow any normal learning path. I was doing massively complex equations with the first few programs I wrote. Only after that did I start learning a new language (C/C++) in a more conventional way.

How any one person learns is different from anybody else. Pair programming can be useful, but I think it would actually slow me down. When the problem becomes difficult enough, I tend to go walking, or lie on the floor. I'd rather that my colleagues not think of me as any stranger than they already do.

Rut Roh...Dope! Thanks for the post Shaggy. I figure all of your combined experiences/suggestions can be combed through and maybe end up being a manual of sorts :)

It would have to be a manual, because it certainly isn't automatic.

Girls aren't yucky, they're scarey and weird but we'd all quite like to have one but, as sociually dysfunctional programmers, we are unable to meet your digital eye and will therefore spend the time shuffling and staring intently at your digital feet.

I first learned to program in the mid to late 80's on BBC Bs and ZX Spectrums. Mostly I copied game code out of magazines and once got an interesting game of lemmings to work (it wasn't the one that went on to become famous). Then I spent the 90s drunk, high as a kite and trying to become a rock star. I failed despite having truly excellent hair and bangles.

Then, finding myself out of work and unable to get a reference due to the somewhat enforced nature of my departure from the previous job, I decided to go to university because I figured students got more money than doleys. I picked an IT course because I was still vaguely interested in it and, once I started, found it gelled and I was enjoying so I decided to stick it out. I think that's the first useful answer I'm giving, really: I "got it" straight away. I wasn't "good at it" yet, but I knew I was getting it. I suspect that, if you don't get that feeling right off the bat then you're probably never going to.

I guess I first started getting good at it after about a year or two in industry and I think that's really because I had a group of peers who were better than me. That's important. You're going to struggle with that if you're working from your bedroom. It's important to get feedback on what your doing so you're going to have to find channels to do that. Forums are probably the next best thing to working with others but you're going to have to be unashamed in putting your stuff out there and inviting criticism. I'm not sure I'd recommend paying a tutor. It's not an individual you need, it's a network.

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Originally Posted by FunkyDexter

I "got it" straight away. I wasn't "good at it" yet, but I knew I was getting it. I suspect that, if you don't get that feeling right off the bat then you're probably never going to.

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I have to agree on this point 150%. I can remember making "functions" on Texas Instrument calculators back in the late 70's - convert Fahrenheit to Celsuis - things like that. I could see how the "registers" in the calculator worked - I could see the PROGRAM COUNTER and how it steps along the instructions. I believe that those employees and interns I've had that were really good also "saw" this - could see under the cover. All our big bloated .Net libraries are just shells around a dozen registers and probably a couple hundred operators (now a days). I'm not going to go as far as to say a good programmer knows ASM - but that they could certainly do it without causing mind-blowing pain for themselves.

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Originally Posted by FunkyDexter

It's important to get feedback on what your doing so you're going to have to find channels to do that. Forums are probably the next best thing to working with others but you're going to have to be unashamed in putting your stuff out there and inviting criticism. I'm not sure I'd recommend paying a tutor. It's not an individual you need, it's a network.

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Wow - another 150% - we are really tooling here! Back in the mid 80's I was a "Research and Development Group Leader" at a national software house. That was good times - those R&D meetings every week - talking about what we did good - what wasn't working - picking on each other for being total dolts - because everyone at the table was always the "best". I still today think that if I was to go on some tv show like Chopped Programmers (on some IT-Television Network) - that I'd not only get to the dessert round, but be on the judges panel the next week.

This is not arrogance speaking - it's confidence.

Us programmers are kind of Jack of all trades - master of none. We have to be able to do anything asked of us.

There was no internet when I started. Digital Equipment VAX minicomputers came with 3 dozen four-inch wide binders of documentation. You read pages of chafe to get to the wheat! (No wonder DEC came out with AltaVista search engine first - they wanted a better way to "find" info in those damn manuals!!).

Imagine being given five DEC-talk machines by Digital - text-to-speech - back in 1985. Then asked to create a High School "call-in bulletin board". I had to write my own "flow-like syntax" so I could script the "path" that pressing 1 or 5 on the phone would take - and the options available at the end of each node.

I never thought I could not do it - that's confidence. And the R&D meetings is where it all got built up.

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Originally Posted by FunkyDexter

Girls aren't yucky, they're scarey and weird but we'd all quite like to have one but, as sociually dysfunctional programmers, we are unable to meet your digital eye and will therefore spend the time shuffling and staring intently at your digital feet.

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Really - eyes and feet - I kind of wander. ;) That's how I found a wife with the best eyes and feet! :bigyello:

She's also my business partner for 15 years now!

I think you'll find a lot of us "old-timers" came from a less than traditional path into it. I got into it almost by accident. I got into a summer program for gifted kids back in the eaaaarly 80's... I was about 8 at the time... it was a program put on by UTEP to keep gifted kids off the streets during the summer and give them something to do... one of the classes I could do was Apple BASIC... sounded interesting... so I took it... the following summer I took the "advanced" class for Turtle LOGO ... Then when I got my own PC - about 2-3 years later... an original 4.77Mhz I.B.M. PC... I dug out the old Apple BASIC books from the class and set about translating what I knew from Apple BASIC to PC BASIC... I'd guess I'd have to say I got it right away, because it seemed so easy an natural for me... and I've been doing this in one form or another. Like the others I've seen a lot of changes over the years. I've taught myself ASM, Pascal, to some extent SQL, built games, programs - and this was all before the age of the internet. In high school I learned about Object Oriented Programming and polymorphism. In college, I learned C++ .... then I joined the Air Force... during training I learned more SQL, and ADA... where me another buddy figured out the secret to learning new languages... they're really all the same, they have variables, control structures, loops, etc... the trick is learning the differences... it was like a whole new world opened up for me, and now new languages "just click" ... made picking up COBOL a whole lot easier ... fortunately my first duty station was a VB shop. Several of us ended up in the same shop together and we go derrided for ending up in a click/drag/drop "cream puff" shop.... well, who's laughing now? That was nearly 20 years ago, I've successfully built a career out of VB, all the way from VB3, all the way through VB.NET. Along the way I've also learned PHP, dealt with multiple database systems, taught myself HTML & CSS, picked up C#, and embraced a side of business that most developers (at least where I'm currently at) are afraid to tread - accounting. And I mean true accounting, not the sales, total it up and add tax kind of stuff routinely seen around here... I mean double column ledger tracking... debits and credits.

To piggy back on szlmany's comment about jack of all trades... there's a comment I saw a number of years ago that I've kept with me.... "A good programmer will know a little bit about a lot of things. A great programmer will know a lot about a few things. The greatest of programmers know when and were to look things up."

Don't try to know everything... People like me an szlmany have specialized in business application... so I can't answer squat about rendering images, doing games programming, things like that because I suck at it... I know this because I gave it a shot once, and it was miserable. I was miserable. For what ever reason, I excel at listening to business problems and coming up with creative solutions for it.

It's called Computer Science, but there is also something of an art to it.

-tg

More than "something of an art to it." Despite decades of attempting to turn programming into a science, it remains stubbornly an art form. Code without creativity is generally crap.

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Originally Posted by Shaggy Hiker

More than "something of an art to it." Despite decades of attempting to turn programming into a science, it remains stubbornly an art form. Code without creativity is generally crap.

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Now there is something that I agree with 150%!! On an even 'larger' scope....Our 'biggest' edge ('ours' being the American Continent) going into the future is creativity. Our culture's major advantage is not stamping out creativity. Though our society is in many ways flawed, lazy & inefficient when compared to others. We always/hopefully will always... be the "heart/home" of creativity. Let the emerging continents spend their time/focus on becoming perfect little robot's playing 'yesterdays game' from the rule-book by which we used to play.. in a 'total information society' the ability to remember/repeat information from books is no longer relevant. Socialist/Communist culture's lead to stagnation by following a mostly singular/common path... where as "win at any cost" culture's breed innovation/change... following many path's.. guess you could almost think of our society as a river with a massive canal system... more ways to get somewhere...far less likely to be flooded... more thing's to see/do along the way.. even if we are all headed to the same place.. it still allows more people to get there & they all get a unique perspective :thumb:

Hmmm, I'd be a bit careful with those assumptions. Putting aside that you lumped Europe in with the emerging and repressive continents (which was probably just to help keep the post brief) I see a huge amount of creativity in IT coming out of South America and the Indian Sub-Continent. I'm not sure they really qualify as repressive in the way you describe but they definitely qualify as "emerging". I also don't see a particular lack of creativity coming from the more repressed areas of the world either. There's plenty of innovation coming out of Russia, China and the Middle East. In fact it was largely creative use of social media that has led to the current Arab spring.

Creativity is a dodgy thing to hang your hat on. When you're at the top of the heap as the US and Europe are (along with Australia, South Africa... and the rest of the developed world) creativity is one of the few things you can hang your hat on because just about everything else can be offered far cheaper by those at the bottom. We tend to think that creativity and innovation requires an education system and ongoing government investment that is hard for the third world to compete with us on. But repression and poverty can breed it's own forms of creativity and innovation and unless you're looking behind you the whole time you can find yourself overtaken and left in the dust before you even know it's happening. Our govenrments tend to support creativity more than, for example, China's, but don't fool yourself that the individuals in China can't compete with you. They can and they will.

I told shaggy not to throw that word art around so much :)

Now - back on topic...

Programming...

...earlier this week I defined how penalty interest is removed from a payment to arrive at the net tax reduction to the base amount of the tax bill. Then I coded that in JavaScript so that my web app could keep it's values updated as the user entered a tax payment.

...today I've just loaded 1.2 million words into a list and I'm looking around for a binary search algorithm I've used somewhere in the past 20 years to attack it. That's got a WPF frontend and VB.Net "services" as backends.

Going to do it in VB.Net first - and then see it fail miserably speed wise and have to go C++ anyway...

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I told shaggy not to throw that word art around so much

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Yeah, I never could resist the politics. My bad.

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Going to do it in VB.Net first - and then see it fail miserably speed wise and have to go C++ anyway...

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There's a really important point there. Part of "getting it" is getting that it's OK to try and fail, as long as you're the sort that can learn from that failure and try again. Our industry is soooo broad that if you ever find yourself thinking that you know the best aproach to a problem you've already blown it. The best you can aim for is to think that you know which is the best aproach out of the aproaches in your own toolset. Even then you probably haven't experimented with the alternatives enough.

I spent about 3 years (only in evenings, not full time) trying to get the Entity Attribute Value pattern to work in a relational database because I wanted to build the ultimate in configurable systems. When I started I didn't even know it was a pattern and I certainly didn't know it was an anti-pattern when applied to relational databases. Even when I started coming aross articles telling me what a bad idea it was I still kept plugging away at it for a while because I was so emotionally invested by then.Eventually I was forced to admit defeat and climb down. I haven't given up on the end goal though. I'm still trying to build an ultimately configurable CRM and marketting package but I've switched to using a No-SQL document based aproach using Mongo. So far it's giving me what I want and it's looking quite promising but it's still all new to me and I'm aware I might hit a wall tomorrow and have to give up again and try something new. That's just the way it is.

As long as you don't get too emotionally attached to what you do, are willing to keep experimenting and are willing to learn from your mistakes then you'll end up being an "OK programmer". I say OK rather than good because when you start thinking you're good you're sunk, because that's when you'll stop with the learning.

I've always likened our work to true ivory tower - guy with the wizard hat.

Keep trying to turn lead into gold and coming just so close.

Hardly ever have visitors but when we do - wow - what a party!

Interesting topic here. Some of you guys make me feel pretty young. Anyways, lets get to it ;)

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Originally Posted by jalexander

Did you learn to program in Visual Basic on a full-time basis?

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For me I guess you could say that. I started programming as a child around 11 or 12 on an Apple computer. Don't ask me what make or model, I honestly cannot remember. I only remember the screen being of a greenish tint. I can't even recall if the language was any derivative of Basic but that is where I first touched programming. Soon after, we got an IBM PC and I learned BASIC by writing code in BasicA. The moved on to QuickBasic Extended which for such a young child, I was quite proficient at. My most significant accomplishment at that time was a game which used ASCII for graphics. I even wrote a level editor for it. It was pretty advanced too. Multiple enemies moving, jumping and shooting. You could have even record replays. Then when the Windows era began a little later on, I was introduced to VB. I could only recall starting at VB2. I think I spent the most time in VB2, time only surpassed by time spent in VB6 and soon to be surpassed by that spent VB.Net. But all the way from the Apple to now, writing code was a constant thing in my life so I guess you could say it was full-time. Though clearly, it wasn't all VB.

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Originally Posted by jalexander

If so, what amount of time passed before you felt like you had a firm grasp of the language & could knock out real-world tasks relatively easily?

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You'd be surprised to know that the language actually has very little to do with weather you can create practical applications. The language is important but not essential. For instance, I touched JavaScript for the very first time last year or so and the very first thing I wrote was a type of slide book widget. You select a page and it slides a bunch of images smoothly inside a window until you reach the selected page. Its a similar thing to the one on Yahoo.com that shows all the news stories. I had only been writing JavaScript code for 2 weeks and I was able to write something like that.

That's because I had done things like that before. In QuickBasic, VB6 and VB.Net. The point I'm trying to make is that its not really about becoming proficient at VB or C but becoming proficient at thinking is terms of algorithms when you are presented with a problem. When you can think like a programmer, then it really doesn't matter what language you're using. Some languages just make certain tasks easier. For example, you'd have to threaten me with a gun to get me to go back to VB6. That doesn't mean I can't solve problems with VB6, its just way easier to solve the same problems with VB.Net.

So don't get too hung up on languages. Practice thinking algorithmically. When you're good at that, you're already 80% of the way there.

To answer your question in such terms, I'd say it took me a lifetime and is still taking time. There's never a point where you're satisfied that you've become a good programmer. Even to this day, I still look back at code that I may have written just a few months prior and wonder how the hell I did it so poorly. "I could have done this better," I think to myself sometimes when looking at older code.

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Originally Posted by jalexander

Who learned Visual Basic without having learned any other languages first? I'm asking this because it's what I'm doing!

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Well as I've stated, I started long before VB was even conceived. While there is nothing wrong with starting from VB, I can't help but think you missed out. There is certain level of discipline that comes with starting out in the 90s with more primitive languages. We had no internet, no forums, no Google. In that environment you are forced to innovate when you need solutions to vexing problems. It gives you this determined mindset that I've seen lacking in many modern programmers, mainly on these very forums. In my days, you couldn't Google up some code when you needed something. You couldn't come on a forums and ask someone how to do this or do that. Your only choice was to slug it out for hours, sometimes even days by yourself until you got it right. Programmers today are way too spoiled in my opinion. Half the newbies that come here with this lax attitude of entitlement would not have made it in the 90s, guaranteed. They'd have abandoned coding in a couple of days. The 90s was the kind of era that forged hardcore programmers. I make no claims on being a great programmer by any stretch of the imagination but by the standards of today, I'm practically a god.

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Originally Posted by jalexander

How many of you were able to gain a firm grasp of coding without taking college courses?

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I'm all self taught. I love programming....well on most days anyway. You'd be surprised at what you can accomplish without formal education when you have your own passion to guide you.

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Originally Posted by jalexander

How many of you aren't going to reply to this post because I'm a female & you think girls are totes yucky / and or unlikely to succeed in programming?

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I adopt a gender neutral when dealing with people online. I couldn't care less about the gender of a person I've met online unless the topic of discussion itself is about gender. I know all too well just how stupid it is to do otherwise. I've pretended to be female already online in gaming communities. You'd be surprised how accommodating a bunch of elitist, rage filled video game nerds on the harsh end of long stretches of involuntary celibacy can become if they get even the slightest whiff of vag. Its really dumb and pathetic. I treat every one equally online. There's only one gender to me here, ASCII ;)

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Originally Posted by jalexander

Finally, how many of you would suggest finding a 'programming buddy' / 'mentor' / or paying for a 'tutor' as part of speeding up the learning process?

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That's a good idea. My father was my mentor when I started coding as a child. It helped me greatly. I eventually surpassed him in knowledge and its been many many years since I needed mentoring by him but it was definitely essential to me becoming a programmer.

OMG This post is long....Well have fun reading if you have the time ;)

Well, I also didn't have it easy. I grew up with computers during the 80's and 90's because of my dad's work. Us kids played games on a black and orange screen and loaded them with floppy disks. We could just do it.

During my high school years my mom and dad opened up a computer college (1995 ). My eldest brother worked there at that time. I wasn't interested at all. So after school ( 1997 ), I wanted to carve my name on my own trees. Unfortunately, money was a factor so I took the first job I could - that was being a security guard. I thought that this would help me with my writing of novels and poetry. I did, and I am thankful for that, but.... Trust me, being a security guard in South Africa is one of the most dangerous jobs out there. The things I saw, I experienced, the things I had to do got to me and I couldn't take it anymore.

I then went through a Windows 95 book, then Dos and all the works. I was happy. I was content. I ended up also working for the college.
Now, my brothers are both technical inclined, I am not - I have ten thumbs

One day my dad braught me a book about Visual C++ and I had to learn it. Honestly I didn't have a clue! I threw the book around so many times out of frustration. The basics I could see what was happening - but that was all.

I eventually finished with the book not having a clue, and baught an introduction to programming book. this book made use of VB 5 for examples. It made things easier. I could understand, but I couldn't figure out where to use what.
I baught another book, VB 6 intro ( among other such as C, C++, BASIC, Delphi ) with all these books I saw them referencing most of the same terms - although different syntax.

After all those books, I decided to make my own program - it was a little JukeBox thingy.
I battled and battled with it for like two months! ( yes, I am that stupid ), but that was my baptism of fire. There things started to click. I still had issues with Arrays. I used them, but couldn't figure out how to proeprly use them in loops etc. Then I attempted more projects - silly "little" things and there everything gelled and fell into place.

Since then, I can program ( but I wouldn't call myself great or advanced - there is still so much to learn ).

The moral of the story is: never give up and always be curious about how things work. That is how I learnt.

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Originally Posted by HanneSThEGreaT

...always be curious about how things work. That is how I learnt.

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It cannot be overstated how important this attitude is for a programmer.

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The language is important but not essential.

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I've preached this for years but, do y'a know, I'm just now starting to rethink it. As languages have become "higher level" and the nuts and bolts are absracted further and further away from us, the syntax knowledge is starting to become more and more important.

I was being interviewed the other day and the interviewer was going through some code of mine. He looked in my data layer where I've got embedded ado sql commands (I absoluetly HATE the Sprocs aproach so I prefer to keep my data access in it's own formal tier, separated properly from the repository itself. Don't get me started on this topic, just don't, OK) and asked why I'd chosen that aproach as opposed to using, for example, Linq to SQL. The only answer I could think of to give was along the lines of "why do I need Linq to SQL? I know SQL".

Even as I gave that answer I knew it was a rubbish one. I haven't bothered to learn the technology because I already know a way of achieving the goal. On the surface that makes sense but Linq to SQL probably makes it easier. It probably adds a whole bunch of other stuff as well that would benefit me hugely but I've turned my back on it because I didn't actually need it. 20 years ago I wrote my own xml parser. I wouldn't dream of doing that now because it would be crazy. I used to write my own linked list implementatations and HTTP listeners and a whole bunch of other stuff that I'd be crazy to do now. So why am I still writing SQL?

I think the reasons are two fold. 1. New language features are starting to come thicker and faster and it's just becoming harder, if not impossible, to keep up with all of them and 2. I moved into management a few years ago so I've been more "hands off" lately. I'm moving back to more coding centric roles these days (I became a contractor) but that period of absence has definitely left me playing catch up. Actually threefold, now I come to think about it... 3: I just plain enjoy writing sql.

Whatever, though, there are increasingly a heeeuge amount of language specific tools and widgits that you can leverage to improve your productivity. Knowing the nuts and bolts is still hugely important. It'll never cease to be. But syntax knowledge is becoming more and more important alongside it.

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you'd have to threaten me with a gun to get me to go back to VB6

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How about threatening you with a large footprint. Would that work? :)

Things like LINQ to SQL and Entity Framework are not really language features. They are frameworks written for the .Net Runtime. They have little to do directly with language syntax. For simplicity we can lump them with specific languages. Knowing about them is definitely a benefit but they are secondary to knowing how to program.

If I told you, "Hey Funky, I need to flatten a hierarchical node tree structure into a list." You can be sure that whatever implementation you come up with would be implemented the same way in all languages. The only difference would be the syntax. Learning a new syntax is cake walk compared to learning how to think through a solution logically which is the foundational discipline needed to be a effective programmer.

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Originally Posted by FunkyDexter

How about threatening you with a large footprint. Would that work? :)

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That'll have to be one huge footprint.

Hi guys

this is the first time i visited the general forum and just had a sudden urge to go here, i dont know why.

first and foremost, since i come here to help and be helped ill post to jalexander first since its her thread.

i started of programming for 2 reasons, the first was, (and im not old lol) i tried programming my zx spectrum when i was very small one time, i failed miserably and not much happened but i was amazed how i made a line appear on the screen after an hour of typing, anyway as a toddler i was was distracted for many years from my new passion.....then one day as a failing teenager my dad asked me "what do you want to do when you get older" and hes saying this angry because it didnt seem like i want anything at the time, but anyway i really thought about it and i told him (and myself, remembering what i did on my spectrum), i want to be a computer programmer. i think because he was angry at me he said how do you expect to do that, you need to be smart to do that, it hurt for a moment, but then something ticked and i told myself why couldnt i do it. so i went off to college shortly after and got a short course in programming, i didnt even know what i was looking for, they suggested vb so i took it. and so i started learning it for 1 hour a week. im not sure what happened but you know the first few lessons, hello world etc and i started excelling at it, my tutor is giving us instruction on how to put text into a label and im writing whole methods capturing peoples inputs and calculating things on my first calcualtor while at the same time sending him my classwork.


i never felt so proud at myself not only because i could tell my dad, look dad im actually programming, but i was excelling so fast, it was almost 2nd nature, but life after a while decided that it wasnt going to be something i could use just yet, and i left college early but i continued studying vb as a hobby.

now i got to a point where i was doing the basic things and i was using vb6, and i didnt have much time to study and i couldnt really get a job where im playing around with controls and doing basic things, and then expect to make a living from it, so it was put on hold for a few years.

then out of the blue in my early twenties i got hooked onto it again, i got into that 'i wanna make a game' frame of mind and started learning directX, and physics and started exploring alsorts of wierd and wonderful ideas, i never really had a problem learning how to make all this stuff work, sometimes it took trial and error but i usually got it in the end. then again life decided to put everything on hold.

so right now im 32, i recently decided im going to start using this knowledge and make use of it, im just a normal guy, and i have kids and my lovely partner, and im determined to do something for them and i decided this was a waste of a talent if i didnt use it, so i started small, i came to vbforums looking for help(thanks guys) on a couple of practice projects, i turned freelancer and i was just hoping to get some small jobs making simple apps to start of with. i was introduced to .net just recently so im still learning about how everything works but compared to vb6, i love it, its so simple and effective, but i have a hard time finding time to learn everything i need, everytime i think im close to been able to make it on my own im thrown back and realize there so much i dont know, and that i need to ge tmy act together and keep learning faster, and harder, and its really hard sometimes, and even today im going over techniques to handle errors properly in vb.net and at the same time im trying to learn error handling in VBA and techniques using goto to get around other problems and as everyone says here, even though the programming languages are getting higher and higher up, it seems there getting so much more complicated its weird lol.

anyway im trying to start a tiny business of office automation and other things, small apps maybe, im not at the level of some of the great guys here, but im a great analyst and i put it to use, and i prey i can do something with it for my family....

wow thats a long speech im sorry :/ but your alone, were all learning and always will be

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They are frameworks written for the .Net Runtime. They have little to do directly with language syntax

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That's true and if you're going separate them then I have to revise my position slightly. It's not syntax knowledge that's important, it's feature knowledge. But that's language specific (or at least, frame work specific) meaning that just being good at systemic thinking etc is less and less tenable. As I said, it's still hugely important and IMO is probably still more important than feature knowledge but the ground's slowly shifting. There'll come a tipping point where feature knowledge trumps nuts and bolts.

GBeats, that's a great (and really quite heart warming) story. I think it's similar to many of us. You found something you had an aptitude for and were able to get passionate about. The fact that it's something that people are happy to pay quite alot of money for is a bonus too :)

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everytime i think im close to been able to make it on my own im thrown back and realize there so much i dont know,

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The mere fact you realise that is what will make you a great programmer. We never know enough, none of us, and we never will. So don't let that stop you from trying to get jobs and contracts. Just understand that you'll still be learning the whole time you're working. And no matter how long you do it your code could always be just a bit better if you knew just a bit more.

Not too soon after I said this...

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Originally Posted by Niya

There is certain level of discipline that comes with starting out in the 90s with more primitive languages. We had no internet, no forums, no Google. In that environment you are forced to innovate when you need solutions to vexing problems. It gives you this determined mindset that I've seen lacking in many modern programmers, mainly on these very forums. In my days, you couldn't Google up some code when you needed something. You couldn't come on a forums and ask someone how to do this or do that. Your only choice was to slug it out for hours, sometimes even days by yourself until you got it right. Programmers today are way too spoiled in my opinion. Half the newbies that come here with this lax attitude of entitlement would not have made it in the 90s, guaranteed.

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does this thread show up and shows exactly what I was talking about. In my days, we had to solve this type of problem ourselves as beginners. We had no choice but to tax the sheer limits of our cognitive ability to figure out why something like this wasn't working the way we wanted. I'll say it again, aspiring programmers today are too spoiled. My 15 year old self would have solved that problem with half the help he had in that thread but he just refuses to put any effort. He wants it all delivered to him on a platter.

Do you know, I had to read and reread that thread about a dozen times before I managed to figure out what he was really asking. He's just trying to copy files from one folder to another right? Where does the list box come into it? I'm still not sure I've understood.


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Thank
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OMG He edited out all his posts. God I hate when they do that.

I'm not entirely sure what he wanted but based on the code provided by the others I surmised it had to do with simple ListBox tasks. Nothing a little effort can't help you solve.

can i add something to the original post.....
:) sorry

forget about controls and basic coding im confident in saying im at an intermediate level and i'm at a place where i think i need to invest so much time and effort, which i dont have as a father and carer(my partner needs lots of caring :D) that im even wondering can i catch up with the environment thats constantly changing, im not even at the forefront yet and i just cant keep up, i dont even feel like im ever going to catch up. i even jumped into the cloud seminar that coming up soon(advertised here) just to skip a few steps but i know after a few sessions im going to have to learn 50 things just to understand whats goiing on.

now saying all that, i know if you dont practice and if you dont study, u will be left behind.. but at the same time i have a voice sayiiing well you just dont have the time, ur kids need you right now, so theres a conflict of interests, and its between ur childhood dream and ur family and of course we know what comes first.

i know theres alot of professional people here and i get how how your will become masters of your field, by practice and hard work, but seriously im not going to mention any names, how do you manage to know EVERYTHING ur all my idols and i just cant even think how u do it.

so where does that leave me, im very passionate about my work, i am far from stupid but im still learning, what should we do???????????????????????? dare i say @ the old guys :)

I work 16 hour days - have for 3 decades - not every day, but enough to make it count. I take big breaks though - self-employed gives you at least that benefit.

I have customers that have lots of money so they always have latest hardware, OS, database - all that great stuff.

I'm getting a Microsoft Surface Pro 2 that just got it's UPS shipping label created two hours ago - that's a week before the much-talked about October 25th delivery date! That's like having a baby in my world!

In the past 5 years I've coded for a pocket-pc - that device went away - great application I made though, got great reviews from users. Shame...

I've newly learned C++ and JavaScript - wow - if you told me 30 years ago that this old-school BASIC programmer would be doing C++ (or let alone some web scripting language like JS!) - crazy!

You adapt - you keep to only bleeding edge - cutting edge was yesterday.

Even if you don't use it you got to know about it - I read threads here that have nothing to do with my moment but the learning is what it's all about.

@jalexander - I would hire you remotely to intern if I thought you had any real time to offer! Getting someone sped up to actually produce takes lots of time - and that's expensive in and of itself.